nekom: It wasn't always twisted pairs. I remember working with ethernet using BNC connectors and coax wire.

Yeah, twisted pair didn't come in until what? 1990?

Back in the 80's it was all coax cable and $1500 adapters. And you'd have to provide your own TCP/IP stack.

And we LIKED it.

Early 90s, bought some co-ax gear for a small office. Installed it. Discovered we didn't have any terminators for the end of the run. Spent the whole day driving around trying to find a place that had some. I learned a lot in those days. Usually after I screwed something up.

I still have all the BNC T connectors and 50 Ohm terminators from the upgrade to 10 meg 10BASET cat 5 in the mid to late 90's. I used some of the bridge connectors to tie them all together and make a monster out of them. Still have it at my desk.

That article was written with all of the knowledge and confidence of "experts" that came along in late 1990s with Windows Servers.

The original Ethernet cards didn't have 10BaseT twisted pair ports. They had the thicknet transceiver connectors and/or the "thinnet" coax BNC connectors. You needed a $50 transceiver to convert to twisted pair.

It wasn't "found" that Ethernet could work or twisted pair, twisted pair Ethernet was engineered, tested, and standardized.

There were no switches in the beginning. There were hubs. There were no Token Ring switches. I'll lay odds that Mr. Tata doesn't know the difference.

mark--fark:jehovahs witness protection: nekom: It wasn't always twisted pairs. I remember working with ethernet using BNC connectors and coax wire.

Don't forget the good ole IBM type 1.

Those connectors were for Token Ring.......

My first network was token ring. Worked great until one day the token fell out and got lost. Only one local store had tokens and they wanted 5 grand for them! That's the day I started switching over to ThinLAN.

The Ethernet standards are a Physical and Link-Layer protocol specification. It does indeed specify what is going on at the physical layer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.3

If you want to complain about the headline, you would have to point out that UTP/STP was nowhere to be found in the original Ethernet specifications.

OK, I'm not really a network guy, just trying to be snarky without having all the information. Thanks for the info.

I used to work for IBM Global Services in the late '90s and our company issued laptops were still using token ring exclusively until about 1998 or so. And yeah, I've heard every joke about the token getting lost and having to buy another one.

My first network was token ring. Worked great until one day the token fell out and got lost. Only one local store had tokens and they wanted 5 grand for them! That's the day I started switching over to ThinLAN.

I worked some on 100 Mbps token-ring cards. That network protocol contained neither tokens nor rings (it was point to point like gigabit Ethernet, and used the 100Mbps-Ethernet physical layer). Never caught on, AFAIK.

show me:I used to work for IBM Global Services in the late '90s and our company issued laptops were still using token ring exclusively until about 1998 or so. And yeah, I've heard every joke about the token getting lost and having to buy another one.

nekom:It wasn't always twisted pairs. I remember working with ethernet using BNC connectors and coax wire.

Ah yes, thin-net. It was similar to a ring or more accurately a dipole. And you had to terminate the ends otherwise signal leakage would cause major havoc.

Funny story - in one place I worked I'm in the conference room with the boss one day and we're working on something. All of a sudden the whole network goes down.

We searched everywhere and the problem was found when I realized the boss had been kicking a connector down on the floor. That connector was a T that essentially was the first link from the origin point.

I upgraded that to UTP sooner than later. That's the thing, the old coax networks worked but EVERYONE shared the same wire causing contention issues. With home runs and switches that alleviates the contention issue.

nekom: It wasn't always twisted pairs. I remember working with ethernet using BNC connectors and coax wire.

Yeah, twisted pair didn't come in until what? 1990?

Back in the 80's it was all coax cable and $1500 adapters. And you'd have to provide your own TCP/IP stack.

And we LIKED it.

Early 90s, bought some co-ax gear for a small office. Installed it. Discovered we didn't have any terminators for the end of the run. Spent the whole day driving around trying to find a place that had some. I learned a lot in those days. Usually after I screwed something up.

Somewhere in my junk drawer I have a bunch of 10B2 terminators I made by making short pigtails of coax with a BNC on one end, stripping the other end and soldering two 20 ohm resistors in parallel across them. (This was for my home network, and I'm cheap.)

So in the oh-so-likely event that you have to find 10B2 terminators... Radio Shack has them, some assembly required.

CS,B:

In the late 80's I ran the computer labs at a small college that was just starting to offer Novell courses. The part-time instructor was a pompus ass who evidently was network admin for some government agency and he would be the first to tell you how smart he was.

He called me at home one saturday morning in a rage to tell me how one of the machines must have failed because no matter what he did he couldn't get it on the class network. So I drive in, take one look at the cabling, and notice that the cable on that machine was coming out of one side of the T connector... looping around and... plugging into the other side of the same T connector.

I saw the headline and thought "Hm... Wasn't the Watson/Crick thing more than 40 years ago?"

Token Ring. Always fun when the token gets lost.

I worked at a company that had thinlan ethernet. They had a terminator come loose in a control room in a factory, and it took down the LAN in the factory and then it jumped over the wan and took down the corporate office LAN.